Benjamin Grosvenor Performs Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto

Live at the BBC Proms: Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé with pianist Benjamin Grosvenor and organist Anna Lapwood in music by Unsuk Chin, Beethoven and Saint-Saëns.

Live at the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Presented by Martin Handley.

Unsuk Chin: Subito con forza
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto No 4 in G major (cadenzas: Saint-Saëns)

8.15 pm
Interval: From Beethoven to Saint-Saens - Martin Handley in conversation with 19th-century music expert Katy Hamilton.

8.40pm
Camille Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 in C minor, 'Organ'

Benjamin Grosvenor (piano)
Anna Lapwood (organ)
Hallé
Sir Mark Elder (conductor)

‘What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again.’ So wrote Camille Saint-Saëns of his last – and greatest – symphony, a work full of melody, invention and sonic drama (not to mention a piano duet effect he liked so much he recycled it in The Carnival of the Animals). Just as the mighty ‘Organ’ Symphony rewrote the 19th-century musical rules, so Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto scandalised audiences some 80 years earlier, with its revolutionary opening and tender, slow-movement battle between soloist and orchestra – famously compared to Orpheus taming the Furies. Beethoven is also the inspiration for Unsuk Chin’s volatile Subito con forza, given its UK premiere here by Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé.